Russia is back to totalitarianism, the only thing that still missing for a full return to Soviet era are bread lines and mandatory people's rallies. With sanctions brought by Putin's military aggression theses are not too far away.

Why do you think there would be bread lines, totalitarianism on a strong economic base (in this case three criminal gang cartels which we could call the Three Branches of Russian Government) works very well for production and distribution

Bread lines will return because combination of sanctions and Putin's effort to Keep Up With the US Military Jonses will put Russia back into impossible economical position of high military spending out of shrinking budget.

I'm not trying to claim that Russia is 'good', but did you notice "Monakhov is using twitter to keep people informed about his experience with the Russian judicial system."? I don't know any people in the US that are allowed to keep their cell phones and tweet when arrested. I have seen people told to turn off their phones or be arrested, I have seen cops threaten to kill journalists (see the cop in Fergusson that was suspended for doing so), and I know that protestors that are arrested have their devices

It's not as stupid as you might think. The cost of transporting it to the place where it's needed could far outweigh (in pure energy costs) the costs of growing it locally.

In general it's true. We grow more than enough food to eradicate starvation through the entire world.

The problem has never been growing "enough". We do that quite easily. The problem has always been distribution - getting the food to where it's needed is costly, and that more than a few governments do things that make it far harder than i

They tried to bypass sanction by selling to Austria, who would then sell on to Russia. The Russians spotting the scam denied entry (Austria is not known for producing oranges).

The farmers were compensated by the EU. But rather than give the food to some needy Greeks, the food was destroyed.

Quick geography lesson. Austria is in Europe (smack in the middle of it) and is part of the European Union. So your statement that somebody tried to go around the Russian food import ban by going through Austria is highly suspect. The way it is actually done is to go through Belarus. Russia is now importing beef from Belarus, which coincidentally is importing cattle from EU (technically the beef is produced in Belarus, as this is the place the cattle gets chopped up). Somewhat more absurd is the sudden appearance in Russian stores of shrimps originating from Belarus [joyreactor.cc] (Belarus is a land locked country). So yeah, if there is a ban there will always be somebody to make money by going around them. The thing is that the Russians will be the ones paying the bill.

We the undersigned are longtime veterans of U.S. intelligence. We take the unusual step of writing this open letter to you to ensure that you have an opportunity to be briefed on our views prior to the NATO summit on September 4-5.

You need to know, for example, that accusations of a major Russian "invasion" of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence. Rath

I don't get it. Germany is the most dependent on Russian gas and Angela Merkel has been the one most dragging their heels on even sanctions. Why would the open letter be addressed to her? Why all the Iraq WMD comparisons when the open letter even admits Germany didn't even want to get involved there? The Baltics states will be the only ones pushing for direct action, and Britian the only one able to take any.

In fact reading through their previous open letters they all seem a bit confused. The only common th

> it would be interesting to learn more about the people involved and their backgrounds

You mean the authors? Russian KGB.

Note the section about Russian "shock and awe". They couldn't abstain from hurling only lightly veiled threats even when faking a letter from US intelligence. It happens if you select people based on common school education instead of competency.

Or anything other than this? I mean, "detained for 15 days" - is that like "arrested and jailed for two weeks (or whatever) for disobeying a police officer", that happens in the US all the time? And at least he didn't put his hands up and yell "I'm not armed", and get shot down by the police officer.....

Now, for you slashdotters who have no clues whatever, who've never actually, you know, gone out to a protest in the RW, in their meat bodies, here's what actually happens: a) there's the folks in the legal p

The more people who know about the developer, the safer he is, at least while he is being harassed by relatively minor officials. We should be happy to accept a post or two about a nerd who is under threat by a government seeking to hide the truth about a military invasion.

Science is done best when it is done with the free exchange of truthful information and ideas. A nation which hides the truth is operating in a way fundamentally contrary both to the ideals of the open source community and to the spirit of intellectual exploration.

Nerds who don't care about that aren't nerds at all. There are a lot of diatribes about the authenticity of geekdom or nerdery. Most are just people trying to identify with one group or another and somehow believing the label affects their status in a way that people around them care about. But at the core of all Slashdot-related identities lie knowledge, intellectual expression, and the taking of joy in the exchange of information.

If you think Vladimir Putin cares how many people know about this guy, you are sadly mistaken. Look how long Pussy Riot members were imprisoned. The only thing Putin cares about is showing people how powerful he is.

Ok, this being offtopic aside, please tell me how long you think Pussy Riot would have been imprisoned, if they'd have "performed" in St. Patrick's cathedral, or, better, in another somewhere in the bible-belt?

Apple != Oranges - In your example, the band would likely get busted for trespassing on private property, then would go to court and have at least some semblance of due process. In TFA, dude got locked up for "disobeying a police officer", which is a bit more ephemeral (and way too generalized) than trespassing would be.

got locked up for "disobeying a police officer", which is a bit more ephemeral (and way too generalized)

In the US they call it "disorderly conduct" or - wait for it - "disobeying a police officer", and people are frequently taken into custody for it. 15 days lockup is fairly harsh, overnight would be more usual, but I doubt it would be difficult to find people locked up for that long in the US on equivalent charges.

When many other people get flat-out killed in too-many-to-count conflicts all around the world, you'd think this is a big story?To me, a death is bigger than an imprisonment, regardless of person. The idea of "celebrity" is artificial, as far as I'm concerned.

And he is doing a noble thing too â" a rare thing among Russians lately, I must add.

No rarer, nor more common than in other times. There are more than 143.000.000 Russians living in Russia after all...

I don't know what forces lie behind the current push towards portraying Russia - the country - as enemy of the 'West' again and the similar push to portray 'the West' and NATO as enemies to Russia but I can only hope that, intelligent as those who frequent this site are supposed to be, you don't give in t

Can we get stories about when kernel developers go to the bathroom as well?

This is hardly anything that matters or belongs on slashdot. Hans Reiser slaying his wife... okay, sure, that meant the end of reiserfs effectively. One kernel dev serving time for a basic civil disobedience charge? Who cares? Its about as important as Bennett Hasleton rants about things he utterly fails to understand.

Yea, a war between 2 of the largest countries in Europe isn't "news that matters" at all. The imprisonment of Kernel developers for their political beliefs, nah... who cares right?

1. Technology does not exist in a vacuum. Slashdot readers sometimes pretend this is the Online Journal of Bits and Bytes, but it ain't so. What happens in the outside world directly affects what practically every company, university, and engineer works on from day to day; not to mention our quality of life apart from work.

Yesterday we had a story of a major iCloud hack. This would've been somewhat interesting if the victims had been, let's say some sorority sisters attending college in the southern part of the USA. The fact that the victims were Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst and Kate Upton made it a story of front page importance, not just on Slashdot but on general newspapers and news sites worldwide; and a much more difficult problem for Tim Cook and Apple.

The NFL thought that the issue of domestic violence was completely unrelated or orthogonal to its mission of organizing professional football games. They just found out otherwise, big time. When a major social or political issue shows up on your doorstep, it's generally a bad idea to stick your head in the sand or some other dark place.

2. This *is* a technology story, and not just because Monakhov works on the Linux kernel. Monakhov has chosen social media as the vehicle for his dissent. While the internal infrastructure of Twitter may not be super interesting, the disruptive effects of social media on nearly all major industries, and on governments, is profoundly interesting, worthy of ongoing discussion here on Slashdot.

3. The effectiveness of civil disobedience depends on support from lots of people outside the region in which the incidents are taking place. Monakhov has identified himself as a kernel developer and is specifically asking for support from the FOSS community. Others may be appealing to their respective external communities as well. If they're ignored, the Russian authorities will feel no risk in shutting them down, or worse.

And we drop the pretense nuanced of understanding the models for boring denier talking point that reflects a piss-poor understanding of both the measurement methods and the most basic attributes of climatology(like inter-annual variation).

Yeah, okay, so you didn't want to "Correct" me out of some more detailed understanding, but instead we're #2 or 3 ranked item in pseudoscientist tactics. You were trying the "It's complicated so any scientific attempt at understanding is foolhardy compared to my outright

You are being silly, just talking of preference of one of infinite number of methods of averaging. That's fine but don't claim that one particular one has to be intrinsic to "climatology" (perhaps one major university in the world has field of study recently created named that, normally degree that would be in a couple other realms for a serious scientist, instead "climatologist" mostly a tag for agenda driven pseudo scientists at the IPCC).

Priceless. That's a great word to use in a "you don't know what you're talking about" speech.

I don't get you guys. You have no clue exactly how mindlessly you're parroting things that you read on a blog somewhere, and me pointing it out is going to result in another angry tu quoque. I can't even imagine what series of thoughts that you might have had that lead you to go "I got you now!" with geophysics. But they aren't anywhere near sane.

information about kernel developer / russian invasion on Ukraine is not important?

Because it's a personal interested story about some guy protesting something that his government did and getting arrested for it.. oh and BTW he's a kernel developer.

TFA has fuck all to do with the state of Russian/Ukraine protests - so it doesn't even count as politicsIt is barely tangentially a technology story - oh noes if a kernel developer goes to jail, what will happened to my precious ^w Linux

information about kernel developer / russian invasion on Ukraine is not important?

Because it's a personal interested story about some guy protesting something that his government did and getting arrested for it.. oh and BTW he's a kernel developer.

TFA has fuck all to do with the state of Russian/Ukraine protests - so it doesn't even count as politicsIt is barely tangentially a technology story - oh noes if a kernel developer goes to jail, what will happened to my precious ^w Linux

So I assume you wrote similar comments to all news about 9/11 or any american politics, which is not related to technology at all?

Nowhere in TFA is there a discussion of politics or the state of protests, and the only relation to technology is that the guy *happens* to be a kernel developer - which is not even germane to TFA

If after 9/11/. had run a story about how some random kernel developer got dirt in his computer after the towers came down (and that was the only topic of the story) I would have reacted just the same.

If however, TFA included summary and discussion of the state of pro-Ukraine protests *within* Russia and/or use o

What's important is that people are dying there for the profit of a a few people. What's not important is your belief, implanted in you by the mass-media that there's an "invasion" going on, which you so gladly jump on, because of your personal, hostile attitude to Russia. Go eat an Apple, fucker!

I don't think it is difficult to conclude that Russian state media's point of view on Russian involvement in Ukraine will closely mirror Russian government's official position. Motivations are less clear for Western media, but at least hard facts, like satellite images, or actual footage from reporters could be largely trusted.

but at least hard facts, like satellite images, or actual footage from reporters could be largely trusted

Following this conflict from the beginning, as I have ties to both countries and the EU, I'm still waiting for any hard evidence. Unfortunately, only thing I see is populism and war rhetoric on all sides and a bit of irony [youtube.com].

You will be waiting yet, as Putin's denial and conspiracy is the way he invents this war. There are massive amounts of messages about weapons both moving into Ukraine, shooting from Russia side, troopers from Kostroma captured on territory of Ukraine or those from Pskov buried after killed in this war. It is obvious how almost settled war has turned over end of August after Russia activated its involvement. There's even Malaysia airliner, shot down from BUK-M system, that was supplied to terrorists by nobod

Nothing you have said about the current conflict (which does not include Crimea, that's a different can of worms, however "suddenly decided to proceed with Russia" is wrong) has been provided proof for.
"massive amounts of messages" - mostly from the Ukrainian state media and ministries, copy-pasted to western outlets and some alleged satellite imagery, which doesn't really show or proof anything.
"shooting from Russia side" - no proof whatsoever, except for the same "reports" from Ukraine and some imagery

Russia had plausible deniability by only supplying things like T-64s to the rebels, but as the rebels were losing it seems Putin couldn't accept that and now there are numerous photos of T-72BMs in the Ukraine and the Russian military is the only military in the world to have access to and operate these:

Similarly, Russian mothers are beginning to ask why their sons are coming back in coffins due to unexplained deaths from a "training exercise" on the Ukrainian border, and where reporters attending their funerals are attacked by mobs that have nothing to do with the funerals in question but magically turn up at them to keep journalists away all the same. Then of course there's the actual Russian soldiers who were outright captured in Ukraine:

Of course, we have history, just this year too, where Crimea was filled with "rebels" who Putin eventually admitted were Russian soldiers, so it's obviously well within Putin's realm of willingness to pass of serving soldiers as civilians until their mission is complete, which, by the way, is a war crime for what it's worth - yes, that's right, admitting this tactic makes Putin a self-admitted war criminal.

When MH-17 was shot down, and it was just T-64s and modern machine guns the rebels had it seemed a bit of a stretch, yet still plausible that this was just a rag tag bunch of individuals fighting on behalf of Russia. Now, with more recent evidence you'd have to be exceptionally retarded to not recognise that Russia is very clearly in the Ukraine with full serving units (hell, the 10 captured soldiers prove that as an outright fact by itself whether you really believe they were lost or not, you don't just allow your soldiers to stumble into a war zone accidentally unless you want them to end up in a potential fight). This is why the tide of battle has changed too from being strongly in the Ukrainian military's favour to now being in the Russia's favour - the Ukrainians are no longer fighting relatively lightly armed insurgents, they're fighting full blown armoured battalions backed up by professionally precision launched artillery strikes all of a sudden - that doesn't just get organised out of nowhere by rebels in a couple of cut off towns with little remaining access to the outside world and dwindling numbers, that requires state level planning, implementation, and financing over an extended period of time to implement - i.e. it requires a professional army.

At this point the only hope is that enough Russian soldiers are killed such that Russians themselves start asking what the fuck they're doing in someone else's country that has done absolutely nothing wrong to Russia (other than hurting Putin's ego) when there's a simple solution of leaving that country the fuck alone and letting it get on with becoming a modern nation even if it does mean Putin's little big man syndrome takes a knock. Thankfully that already seems to be happening to some degree with the Russian soldier's rights institute that's compiled a list of the 400 dead Russian soldiers it believes have been killed in this war already - putting that into context that's very nearly as many lives as the British have lost in 13 years in Afghanistan so thankfully there is a high cost to Russia for this stupidity, and thankfully it is beginning to be noticed by ordinary Russians themselves.

You should treat both sides as untrustworthy. Fabricated evidence, or just total lack thereof, is used by both sides.

It's an amazing trait of modern wars. We often say that cyberwarfare is the threat of the future, but right now information wars, shaping public opinion that's malleable and not always critical enough of the fact presented, is maybe a bigger thing than actual firefights on the ground. Modern technology makes information easy to manipulate, easy to inject into public view, and far, far easier to spread.

Unless a war goes on in your homeland right next to you, you can't really tell if you're being told the truth.

Fabrication of evidence by NATO would be much bigger news than entire war in Ukraine. As such, we are can be certain that facts that are presented by Western media are accurate. What we can't be sure about is what facts are omitted or under-reported. Like civilian casualties and humanitarian crisis in Donetsk. Was it avoidable, could it be meaningfully mitigated by ether side?

My second purpose today is to provide you with additional information, to share with you what the United States knows about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as well as Iraq's involvement in terrorism, which is also the subject of resolution 1441 and other earlier resolutions.

It became also a huge story once the whole thing was debunked. I look at media coverage as follows:

1. There has been numerous clear fabrications by the Russian media and the state. For example actors have been posing as different people (you can find these on youtube). In addition, pictures have been from different places than claimed. These have been used as evidence for their version of the story.

2. The only sort of pictures that I've seen fabricated by Western media was the one video on the MH17 falling

It was also Colin Powell, not NATO and not speaking for NATO. Yes, it was the US administration's viewpoint that it was trying to push, though there is evidence that the administration was fooling itself though bias to see only what it wanted to see rather than trying to fool the world. And the US administration also is not NATO and not even dictator of NATO, it still has to do a lot of wheedling and diplomacy to get NATO to act.

Oh, sure, you keep believing that you have a free press, which is not tied to the military-industrial complex or other interest groups. Or that there's any free media at all. Or that there's a democracy anywhere in the world.

but I happen to live in the country, expressing strong support to Ukraine due to own historical lessons, received from the same imperial aggressor

So either one of the Baltic states or Poland, I figure? I'm in Germany and German media carbon-copies Ukraine's press releases. I have quite an array of outlets and sources I compare, and all I see is that most either leave out facts, contradict each other, use vague, suggestive terms and formulations, etc. Recently I started preferring to watch and read the actu

Actually the media is almost subverted now by social networks perhaps. People in the West may ask "why isn't this being reported on" in various cases, when those stories are indeed being reported but they're not becoming popular stories because they don't make waves on the social media. People are tired of war, they skim past those stories in the paper (if they still bother to read papers), or if they self-select their news online then they don't select those stories. We're basically permanently removed

Yes, but the tanks and artillery the "separatists" keep popping up with are coming from somewhere. At this late stage in the game, they certainly aren't Ukrainian remnants that the separatists have captured in those Ukrainian territories - those were used and destroyed many months ago.

So one of two things are happening. Either Putin and friends are blatantly lying and calling for peace talks and negotiations while they are pouring heavy military equipment into Ukraine, or Putin has no control over his military and anybody can just hop in one of his tanks and leave Russia in it. Either way, he looks like a fool with such obvious blatant lies, or due to his weakness as a military leader. I think we know which of those two is more likely.

Oh, and everyone seems to have quickly forgotten all the civilians that died on a passenger jet because of Russia's antiaircraft missiles. It blows my mind in this day and age that a country that is supposedly a big part of the world community can get by with shooting down a plane and the rest of the world does absolutely nothing about it.

There are even youtube videos showing separatists getting museum tanks running. And seriously, I don't think several hundred tanks were destroyed in that conflict. I'd be surprised if so much as ten were.

Can you produce a link to the photo? Without even seeing it, I doubt all of what you call "tanks" were even tanks. Probably some or all of them were BMPs, armored cars, or something else. But that's just a wild ass guess; we can settle the facts if we see the photo.

A tank is a thickly armored tracked vehicle with a fully revolving turret mounting a large bore gun. Anything with a tiny looking gun, usually in a tiny turret, is something else.

Yes, but the tanks and artillery the "separatists" keep popping up with are coming from somewhere. At this late stage in the game, they certainly aren't Ukrainian remnants that the separatists have captured in those Ukrainian territories - those were used and destroyed many months ago.

Really? I was reading in the Guardian (which has proven itself to be woefully biased in the past few months) that the separatists were surrounding and capturing Ukranian army units just last week. What's more, in the past days we've been reading about waves of deserters from the Ukrainian army. Nobody is claiming the separatists are armed only with stuff they got months ago. They're claiming, and so is Kiev, that they've been able to obtain large quantities of arms from the fleeing, conscript-based Ukrainian army.

Meanwhile Poroshenko is trying to claim that there's an Russian army rolling around in his country...... yet so far nobody has been able to actually find it. An entire army! Over 1000 soldiers and 100 tanks! Such a unit requires support vehicles, a tent town, supply lines.... so where is it? Maybe it's sort of like invasion by aid convoy.

1000 soldiers is hardly an army. A battalion to brigade at best. 100 tanks are crewed by about 300 soldiers. So, if there are 1000 soldiers, then you have up to 700 available as support (this number would almost certainly include other types of combat troops such as motorized infantry). Furthermore, such a force would have up to 50000 km to disperse in as the current situation certainly does not call for concentrating in one place.

That means if there are 1000 additional Russian soldiers rolling around in

No, as a matter of fact, I don't know. I've successfully avoided being drafted 1.5 times (had to undergo basic training once and was then "released"). Do you know? Do all these soldiers miraculously also loose their cell phones?

And NVUA is probably really objective and stuff, being a Kiev-based newspaper. And with their financiers and editorial team... Hmm... The submission is from a Mr. Gelman, who's a "gallery dealer and art-manager." I'm sure Mr. Lukin (former Yabloko member) and the mysterious "other p

I don't know that I'd compare KGB-style fabrication of news with a western-style free press.Ever since MH17, we are all part of this war. It doesn't have to be within some imaginary lines.Ukraine's only fault is giving up its nuclear weapons and throwing off the balance.

that's a russian lie machine line.their approach is to lie a lot, then claim that you can't trust either side and just try to have some middle ground.

sorry, after "no russian soldiers in crimea" and lots and lots of other cases if you actually care to read about them - i can't see how an honest and informed person could trust that large terrorism sponsor state. no wonder "terrorussia" is used more and more often.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Satellite images of Russian armored columns entering Ukraine, captured active duty Russian troops, secret burials of killed Russian soldiers, rebel chain of command composed entirely out of Russian citizens with ties to KGB are all disagree with you. You can account for maybe one of these by claiming accidental what-have-you, but combined they establish clear pattern.

At a press conference on Thursday, August 28, Dutch Brig. Gen. Nico Tak, a senior NATO commander, revealed satellite images of what NATO says are Russian combat forces engaged in military operations in or near Ukrainian territory. NATO said this image shows Russian self-propelled artillery units set up in firing positions near Krasnodon, in eastern Ukraine.

This is an extremely misleading way to phrase things. Krasnodon is not just "in eastern Ukraine". It's right on the border. So being near it can also mean in Russia. The above comments from NATO mean nothing, assuming CNN is reporting them accurately. What about the others.... hmm let's see.

Image 2 is from inside Russia and they say so. Image 3 is also in Russia. Image 5 is captioned twice, once with "Russian self propelled artillery unit inside Ukraine" and again, but this time it's again "near Krasnodon", which is practically in Russia. If there's an obviously demarcated border in this area it's hard to see based on the Google satellite images. The last image doesn't even claim to be of anything in particular, the caption is merely summarising story in general.

Both Russian and Ukranian troops appear to regularly cross the border without realising it - there have been repeated reports of Ukrainian forces entering Russia and then being redirected back across the border, with no obvious blowback. Given these things, and the fact that western media is in full-blown propaganda mode and not even hiding it, I'm going to want way stronger evidence than this.

But honestly, even if Russia did invade, this would merely make it on par with the USA and UK, both countries that practically revel in invading other countries and wading into other countries civil wars. So a part of me couldn't get too excited even if it did happen. It's definitely NOT worth a serious, major conflict between Russia and the west.

I fully agree with you, but searching all over I can find exactly 1 satellite photo claiming to be Russian made armor. Of course the huge problem in claiming this is actually Russian is that nearly every country in Eastern Europe uses Russian made tanks, artillery, helicopters, aircraft, etc... I have see no satellite images that tracked any movement from Russia to the Ukraine.

Don't speculate on the few exceptions to the rule about Russian weapons, you said we can't argue with different facts. I want fac

If you think that MSNBC, FOX News and CNN agree on something and it's still not true, well, you better have a helluva citation yourself.

I'm pretty sure someone powerful enough to be putting on a global misinformation campaign has no problem feeding those three news outlets whatever press releases or "news" they want. Not saying that this is happening, but the WMD misinformation wasn't all that long ago.

You got that right. Credible citations are bloody well needed. And satellite photos are useless as hard evidence. They don't show what nationality is manning the vehicles. For example, supporting rebels with hardware and training is emphatically NOT mounting an invasion.

"Secret burials" is an absurd assertion. Either nobody not involved knows about them, or they were not secret. Elementary logic. Sorry, but just asserting there were secret burials does not count as genuine evidence, let alone proof.

The invasion of Europe by Russia is pretty big news, and will have an impact on everything from the economy to space exploration. NATO has direct evidence of the invasion, and Russia is hardly trying to hide it any more apart from the loopy puppet Sergei Lavrov (the new Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf). Ukraine has already introduced conscription, so that's already a pool of potentially talented young programmers off to get slaughtered by Russian tanks. The Russian murder of those Dutch people in the airliner also has affected air traffic.

As Europe gets sucked unwillingly into war with Russia, this is going to get quite brutal as the Putin doesn't care how many people die on either side even his own. He's got a fair amount of cyber-warfare talent to call on too. Maybe this will be the wake-up call to start putting in place proper encryption EVERYWHERE. War with Russia is a little more important than the NSA passing on tips on drug dealers.

A good cyberwarfare department could easily post lots of fake satellite imagery to google from multiple sources.

A good cyberwarfare department does what it's told. Gaining foreign hostility is likely one of Putin's goals in all this, because he can use the resulting siege mentality to concentrate more power in his hands. For that matter, economic sanctions work in his favour too, since they get Russians used to lower standard of living which gets blamed on West, thus allowing Putin to move economic resour